Monday Updates

Good things happen when Karen cleans out her office, see -->

Thanks, Karen! It will certainly be a while before I run out of reading material.

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deleted to protect the innocent : ), but still, congrats!

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Speaking of mss and first book contests, I was telling Mary this morning that my goal was to have my ms ready for the mail by the end of the week so that I can hit some of the later deadlines.

Since then (an hour and a half ago), I've been thinking that maybe I don't want to do that. I have about 20 poems published right now, but more than half of those (more than 2/3, probably) didn't make the cut when I put my thesis together. Note - I'm not saying I don't like the poems I've published, just that many of them aren't part of the manuscript. At any rate, I think I'd like to have a better publishing record before I start sending out the manuscript, and it certainly wouldn't hurt to revise the thing a bit more now that I'm not rushing for thesis defenses and deadlines.

I know some poets (not naming any names...) who had published nearly every poem in their first books individually before they were published together--but I've also seen acknowledgement pages with only five or six credits. I'm not sure which is better, but I wonder, if the poems aren't jumping out at editors in groups of five or six, then are they going to jump in a group of fifty? I'm not complaining or whining. I'm really happy with the responses I've gotten so far, and I think 20-some poems in a year is pretty awesome, but maybe I'm rushing. So, the question remains: do I let my ms incubate for 8 months or so and try for the end-of-08 contest season, or do I get what I've got in the mail for the February deadlines?

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Working on my syllabi this week. But more importantly, working on class plans. I'm hoping this semester, I will be able to plan far enough ahead that I only have to prep before class when something unexpected comes up.

UA is doing a huge, cross discipline forum on race relations in February, with lots of speakers and round table discussions. We had a meeting about it this morning, and I think it's going to be pretty cool...but I get flustered whenever the conversation in my classroom turns to something sensitive, so I'm worried that I won't be able to teach it effectively. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.